Qualcomm has already revealed that Snapdragon 835 is officially the world’s first 10nm SoC, and Fudzilla exclusively posted this in April 2016. At that time, Qualcomm didn't want to officially talk about the insides of the Snapdragon 835, but a leaked roadmap claims that the new SoC has 4+4 cores based on updated Kryo 200 architecture.

The same leak doesn’t talk about any clock speeds, but one can assume that there are four faster and more powerful and four slower cores, something that you saw with the Snapdragon 810 and the Snapdragon 600 series. A Chinese source includes the fact that this is a 10nm FinFET processor and has a Snapdragon X16 Gigabit class modem. These two things have been officially confirmed by Qualcomm.

The roadmap details Adreno 540, obviously, with faster GPU support for 4x LPDDR 4x @ 1866 MHz memory. The new Snapdragon 835 (also called MSM 8998 internally) supports UFS 2.1 storage and it is supposed to arrive in Q1 2017. The source is quite confident that you can expect to see this SoC inside some versions of Samsung Galaxy S8 phones.

Snapdragon 660 is clearly a successor to the recently launched Snapdragon 653. The Snapdragon 653 comes with four Cortex A72 with speeds up to 1.95GHz and four Cortex A53 for power saving. The new Snapdragon 653 supports a few important features that will drive phone sales in the mainstream part of the market in 2017. The Snapdragon 653 has a Snapdragon X9 Cat 7 modem with 300 Mbps downlink speeds and 150 Mbps uplink speeds, dual cameras, and supports 8GB of RAM.

This is what you will see in mainstream phones in early 2017. Let’s not forget the Qualcomm upload plus. It comes with 2x20MHz carrier aggregation and 64-QAM modulation on both upload and download side. We think 8GB will be very big for mainstream and performance phones, but of course is pure marketing and very little to do with need or necessity.

According to the leaked roadmap, the information about the chip potentially called Snapdragon 660 are all over the place. First they called it the MSM 8976 Plus and Qualcomm shared on its website that the Snapdragon 653 also shares a 8976 Pro internal branding. The Snapdragon 660 and 8976 Plus might be two different chips. In any case they would come to replace the Snapdragon 653 / 652 SoCs.

The roadmap also claims that the MSM 8976 Plus chip comes with Kryo 4x4 configuration while the Snapdragon 660 comes with Cortex A73 quad core with four Cortex A53s. It would make a lot of sense to see the 14nm Cortex A73 quad core with four Cortex A53 cores. The GPU is updated to Adreno 512, while the Snapdragon 653 comes with Adreno 510. The 14nm makes sense as it will offer a lot of power savings compared to the Snapdragon 652 and 653, both based on a 28nm manufacturing process.

We would not expect to see Snapdragon 660 and mysterious MSM 8976 Plus before the middle of next year at the earliest, but the roadmap also claims that the new chip comes with Snapdragon X10 300/ 150 Mbit capable LTE Category 13 (uplink) LTE Category 7 (downlink) modem.

Last and not least, the new MSM 8976 Plus might support UFS 2.1 storage and 2x LPDDR4 4X at 1866 MHz.

Kaby Lake, the third generation 14nm was launched in 2016 and it looks like Cannon Lake 10nm Intel CPU might only launch in late 2017. But it is fairly certain that the Snapdragon 835 mobile SoC is going to ship in the first half of 2017.

Intel had its share of problems with 10nm, and Qualcomm pumped out a chip just months after Samsung announced its 10nm FinFET manufacturing process. Both Samsung and TSMC were aiming for late 2016 volume production on 10nm and the fact that Qualcomm committed with its flagship product means that it has to manufacture tens of millions of SoCs for the high end phones that will define 2017.

Snapdragon 835 is the world’s first 10nm chip. With 10nm the SoC has a smaller footprint, and can be packed with more transistors per square millimeter and still get better power performance. The extra space means better CPU, GPU or DSP performance, a faster modem and all these three elements define a modern SoC such as Snapdragon 835.

Intel’s Cannon Lake is a bigger chip and its higher TDP makes it different from the Snapdragon 835 mobile SoC. Intel wants a much higher TDP. It starts with 5W for the Core M and goes all the way to 130 W for the high end desktop or server. A mobile SoC such as Snapdragon 835 stays in the 2.5 to 5W TDP range to fit phones or tablets.

Snapdragon 835 carries on the success wave which started with the Snapdragon 820 and 821, which won 200 design wins. We still don’t know how Qualcomm counts its design wins but we were told that a design win is not just a different color or memory configuration.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 announcement is also a slap in the face of Apple, Huawei, Samsung and MediaTek. Being first counts in this market. We expect to see Samsung and MediaTek announcing their 10nm SoCs while Apple's A10 will be 16nm. Huawei just announced its Kirin 960 in 16nm FinFET too. This is the best that the number two and number three companies by phone volume can do.

Intel exited mobile SoCs after spending billions in failed investments. It currently struggles to get into some of emerging markets such as automotive, drones and other IoT related markets. This is where intel wants to grow and it is going to have a fight on its hands for 5G dominance. This is something we heard from Samsung, MediaTek, Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson and many other chip or network manufacturers.

Being the first in 10nm and reaching customers in first half of 2017 is an important statement. And it comes only weeks after Qualcomm acquired NXP for $47 billion , a strategic move that gives the company a much stronger footing in IoT and automotive markets.

Qualcomm and Samsung have announced that the latest Snapdragon 835 is using Samsung’s 10nm process technology. One thing is clear the 2017 Snapdragon is now officially the Snapdragon 835.

Both companies have announced the partnership without revealing a lot of details about the Snapdragon 835 itself. This is one of these sories "we told you so" as Fudzilla revealed back in April that the Snapdragon 2017 will be 10nm. We and most of the world called it Snapdragon 830, but, apparently, the company decided to use the Snapdragon 835 name.

The Snapdragon 835 is in full production and expected to see it in commercial devices in the first half of 2017. The 10nm FinFET, the Snapdragon 835 processor will result in a smaller chip footprint. This gives OEMs more useable space inside future products to support larger batteries or slimmer designs. Going from 14nm FinFET with Snapdragon 820 to 10nm and making a more advanced chip design move is expected to result in significant improvements of battery life.

We are excited to continue working together with Samsung in developing products that lead the mobile industry. Using the new 10nm process node is expected to allow our premium tier Snapdragon 835 processor to deliver greater power efficiency and increase performance while also allowing us to add a number of new capabilities that can improve the user experience of tomorrow’s mobile devices.”

Bear in mind that this is the first ever announced mobile 10nm FinFET SoC and we can expect higher performance and lower power compared to Snapdragons 821 and 820.

In October, Samsung announced they are the first in the industry to enter mass production of 10nm FinFET technology. Compared to its 14nm FinFET predecessors, Samsung’s 10nm technology - allowing up to a 30 percent increase in area efficiency with 27 percent higher performance or up to 40 percent lower power consumption.

This can at least give you an idea what to expect from Snapdragon 835, once the company officially announces it. Since Qualcomm’s CEO Steve Mollenkopf is set to do a second day keynote at CES, it gives you the idea that we may learn a bit more about the Snapdragon 835 too. Mobile phone manufactures are already undergoing working on the successors of the Snapdragon 820 phones launched in March 2016 and later and we expect a lot of phone announcements around the Mobile World Congress 2017 in late February 2017.

Jong Shik Yoon, executive vice president and head of foundry business, Samsung:

“We are pleased to have the opportunity to work closely with Qualcomm Technologies in producing the Snapdragon 835 using our 10nm FinFET technology. This collaboration is an important milestone for our foundry business as it signifies confidence in Samsung’s leading chip process technology."

Snapdragon 835 follows the Snapdragon 820/21 processor, which has over 200 designs in development. Just a month ago Keith mentioned that Snapdragon 821 and 820 scored 150 designs, and the number increased by a third in just a few weeks.

Qualcomm’s executive vice President Cristiano Amon has confirmed, on the record, the existence of a premium tier 10nm Snapdragon.

Amon said that Qualcomm will introduce its new premium tier Snapdragon at 10 nanometer in 2017

Cristiano and George Davis deflected a great question from Michael Walkley from Canaccord Genuity, about whether the Samsung Note recall whould mean a better mix of the iPhones or higher mix within the Chinese smartphone market. Cristiano Amon is an executive vice president and president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT).

Cristiano added that we can expect that Qualcomm continues to have growth in adjacent businesses, which is going to have a positive impact and offset the seasonality we saw with OEM mix.

In early 2016, Fudzilla has wrote that the Snapdragon 830 is going to be 10nm and we epect that this chip is going to launch later this month and ship in phones in Q1 2017. This will be just in time for the next generation flagship phones including the Samsung Galaxy S8 and similar.

OnePlus 3T might be the rumored phone powered by the Snapdragon 821 SoC but the company’s CEO Peter Lau last week in Hong Kong told Fudzilla and a few other people that it doesn't have any plans to make a phablet.

When you put two and two together, you might get to see yet another high-end phone, that would sit on top of the currently available OnePlus 3. Peter also told us that the company doesn’t have a plan for a mainstream phone either, making it obvious that, if launched, the OnePlus 3T would be more powerful than the OnePlus 3 phone.

The Snapdragon 821 is a faster chip compared to Snapdragon 820, and you can expect that the CPU and GPU could be around 10 percent faster. The new phone will stick with the AMOLED screen and Peter told us that the phone design, camera performance and usability are the three key things that are in the OnePlus design philosophy.

The device A3010 was found in the China’s equivalent to a FCC (China Compulsory Certification (3C)) and was the only solid lead that sparked the talks. OnePlus will focus on the western market as well as China and it remains to be seen if it will come out with an updated version of the phone soon.

Bear in mind that Qualcomm Snapdragon 830 powered phones are expected to ship in Q1 2017 and we strongly believe that OnePlus 4 or whatever the company ends up calling it, will be one of many Snapdragon 830 powered devices.

Samsung Electronics has been signed on to be the sole contract manufacturer for Qualcomm 's next high-end Snapdragon chips.

According to the South Korean Electronic Times, Samsung will make Qualcomm's Snapdragon 830 mobile processors using 10-nanometer production technology, adding that the South Korean firm agreed to use the processors in half of its next update of the Galaxy S smartphone that will launch in 2017.

This is continuing the story of Qualcomm's love affair with Samsung. The company announed in January that Samsung was the sole manufacturer of the predecessor Snapdragon 820 chips - a deal that some analysts said at the time was worth more than $1 billion.

Samsung and Qualcom did not immediately comment on the report, so at the moment it is just a well sourced rumor. But it does make sense.

Samsung is about to jack 6 MB of RAM under the bonnet of a midrange phone.

According to Tech Radar, while most flagship phones are happy with 4GB of RAM, Samsung is about to stick GN into the next Galaxy C9.

Benchmark figures have tipped up with the 6GB figure listed and the C9 is not a high-end handset. In fact, normally few people would pay much interest to it. The rest of the C9 specs, include a 5.7-inch 1080p screen, a Snapdragon 652 processor and 16MP cameras on both the front and back. All pretty much upper mid-range stuff.

The belief is that it probably will not be seen in the West anyway and it is not clear why anyone would want that much memory in the first place.

It does mean that Samsung phone will certainly be jacking more memory into Samsung Galaxy S8 because who wants their flagship eclipsed by the mid-range.

Fudzilla had a chance to play with first all integrated Snapdragon VR820 HMD, a head mounted display that is one step ahead of the Galaxy VR or other slot in phone HBM solutions.

We saw the first demos of the prototype called the Snapdragon VR820 and had a chance to hear this new VR device first hand from Hugo Swart, a Senior Director of Qualcomm's IoE-consumer electronics and Jim Merrick, Marketing Director, Internet of Things at Qualcomm.

The Snapdragon VR820 SoC is totally integrated into the headset. The prototypes we saw and tried were in both white and black but it was pointed out to us that customers will decide about the final form factor and design of the product. Qualcomm is just showing what many call "proof of concept", a device that can be turned into an actual product by a partner.

The prototype has been developed by Goertek, a leading global ODM and apart from the Snapdragon VR820 the headset features two eye tracking cameras, dual front facing cameras for six degrees of freedom (6DOF) and see-through applications, four microphones, gyro, accelerometer, and magnetometer sensors. All this, including a battery, is integrated in rather nifty design.

We were wondering at first why the reference platform had a weight at the back or the strap but it all became clear when we had the device on our head. Qualcomm engineers realised that the counter weight would make it comfortable to wear.

Another important thing is that the device comes with a heatsink, something that we haven’t seen on a phone. The heatsink will make a difference as with HMD and using the headset for VR, you would have to get higher performance of the Snapdragon VR820 for a longer period of time.

The way the standard mobile phone chip works, is it gets to the highest possible clock for a split second, e.g. when you launch an application, and it tends to return to idle – low power mode as soon as possible, all this to save the battery life. With a Head Mounted VR Device, you would need the SoC to perform consistently at higher performance and the heatsink is there to help.

You might have read about the Pokemon draining batteries faster than anything, as your display is always on, your camera is working and this is roughly the worst case scenario for a phone as it consumes maximum energy. HMDs like VR820 will do a better job compared to a phone slot as they would have provide a more optimized platform for a dedicated task.

Qualcomm uses a 1440x1440 resolution per eye AMOLED panel that supports up to 70Hz. Since this is a prototype and Goertek decided to use the 70Hz displays but of course the final products will focus on using 90Hz or higher displays. Despite the 70 Hz, a few demos we saw were looking good.

The Adreno 530 has been made with VR in mind and Tim Leland, Vice President of Product Management at Qualcomm, and a key guy for Adreno pointed out to Fudzilla that Adreno 530 was optimized for VR and technologies such as Daydream.

Qualcomm also has a lot of sound specific features including stereo, binaural positional audio, and 3D surround sound, powered by Qualcomm Aqstic audio technologies and four microphones with Fluence HD noise filtering and active noise cancellation.

Since intuitive interaction is a very important part of building a successful VR device, Qualcomm uses a Dual Qualcomm Spectra camera ISPs combined with the Qualcomm Hexagon DSP for advanced vision features such as look-through imaging and 3D reconstruction, eye-tracking and hand predictive monocular visual motion tracking with full 6Degrees Of Freedom at 800Hz for smooth tracking of head motion in movement as well as rotation and ultra-fast sensing, processing with average motion to photon latency under 18ms.

Bear in mind that Qualcomm has announced the VR Software Development kit and of course after the Snapdragon 820, the company plans to launch a 10nm even more powerful Snapdragon 830, featuring an even faster GPU.

The Snapdragon VR820 should be available in Q4 2016 with the first commercial devices based on the platform expected to be available shortly afterwards.

Qualcomm just released a blog post and gave more details about the Snapdragon 821 including some clock speeds and the fact that it needs five percent less power.

Asus ZenFone 3 Deluxe is the first announced phone and there should be more companies announcing phones based on this faster SoC.

The Snapdragon 820 has two Kryo cores clocked at 2.15 GHz and two lower-power Kryo cores clocked at 1.59GHz while the Adreno 530 GPU was clocked at 624MHz. The Snapdragon 821 has two Kryo cores now clocked at 2.4 GHz, and two lower power Kryo cores. We didn’t get any information about the clock speeds of these two cores.

Qualcomm said that the GPU is five percent faster. In real life you should be getting up to 10 percent faster boot times and app load times could increase as much as 10 percent. This is, of course, compared to the Snapdragon 820. It looks like that the engineers managed to save some power out of the new and improved SoC as the company now claims that Snapdragon 821 delivers an incremental five percent power saving when comparing standard models.

There are a few new features including a Dual PD (PDAF), a significantly faster image auto-focus speed under a wide variety of conditions when compared to single PDAF solutions. This should essentially bring better photography on Snapdragon 821 powered phones.

Snapdragon 821 has extended the range of laser auto focus ranging compared to Snapdragon 820. It has extended the visual focus range and improved laser focal accuracy. When it comes to the modem, the Snapdragon 821 still has the same Snapdragon X12 modem capable of Cat 12 600 Mbps download and Cat.13 150 Mbps upload speeds. Since LTE-A with speeds higher than 300 Mbps should happen at many places in 2017, Snapdragon 821 would be ready to support these fast upload and download speeds. Carrier Aggregation is the term and more and more carriers are supporting it, making the internet on your device faster. Snapdragon 820 / 821 also support LTE-U, an unlicensed spectrum that can speed things further especially in congested areas like big cities, popular squares, and sports events.

One of the most used feature on your phone is Wi-Fi. The Snapdragon 821 supports 802.11ad and 802.11ac 2x2 MU-MIMO. Multi User Multiple Input Multiple Output is a great feature which allows the Wi-Fi to be up to 2x or 3x faster than 802.11ac without MU-MIMO.

There is native support for Android 7.0 Nougat as well as Snapdragon VR SDK support including Daydream, but this is something that is also supported on Snapdragon 820 and some other chipsets from the company.

It will be interesting to see which is the next big company will relase machines based on the new Snapdragom, but it is rumored that Google 2016 Nexus devices, LeEco Le 2S, Xiaomi Mi Note 2 might end up having this faster SoC.

Snapdragon 830 is likely to be announced this year but this 10nm part is expected to show up in phones around February 2017 of Mobile World Congress 2017. Until that time Snapdragon 821 will likely be the fastest SoC to power the high end phones around the globe.

When David Wong from Wells Fargo asked Steve Mollenkopf when we could expect a tape out of 10 nanometers and samples, Steve answered that it had already happened.

We expect to see the successor of Snapdragon 820 being introduced this year and shipping in phones in late Q1 early Q2 2017. This has been the course of things for a while at Qualcomm. The timing also mateches a normal phone refresh lifecycle as most companies - including Samsung - will launch their next generation phones at the Mobile World Congress that takes place in Barcelona on February 27 2017.

This might be the 10nm that Mollenkopf mentioned and confirmed that it has been sampled to customers. We can call it Snapdragon 830 but there are no real guarantees that this will be the final branding. Steve also said that Qualcomm will continue its multi-sourcing strategy for 10nm and beyond.

Multi-sourcing is always a good strategy, as having more than one supplier is definitely better and safer. After 10nm, Samsung, TSMC, GlobalFoundries and Intel will use 7nm and then 5nm.

From what we've heard, we will be stuck at 10nm for a while probably through 2017 while we might see some of the first 7nm products in 2018. After 7nm comes 5nm and then it becomes very interesting as the semiconductor manufacturing industry can't work out how to get smaller than that. It's the end of Moore's Law.

So the next generation phones that we expect in early 2017, powered by the next generation 10nm Snapdragon will definitely get faster on a CPU, DSP and GPU side, probably getting more processing power and performance at the same time. This has been the case since the introduction of the smartphone, and won't change anytime soon.